Diglossic communities in transition: the cases of the Limburgs and Swabian speech communities in Australia.

This article discusses the Limburgs and Swabian speech communities in Australia. The study of multilingualism in Australia has always placed great emphasis on the investigation of the language-maintenance and language-shift patterns of immigrant communities. It has been regarded as an important area of research which contains information crucial to related issues such as language policy and bi- and multilingual education. Ever since Ferguson first introduced diglossia to the Anglo-American and Germanic (socio)linguistic spheres, the concept has been surrounded by controversy. By the mid-1960s the main point of confrontation had become the question of which criteria and how many features as described by Ferguson were necessary to label a language situation as diglossic. Two language varieties, Standard Dutch and a Limburgs dialect, seemed to constitute the language repertoire of all the Limburgs informants. In the informants' opinions there was a clear-cut distinction between Standard Dutch and the Limburgs dialect at both the linguistic and functional levels: the two varieties were seen as separate language systems, each with its own phonology and lexicon, which did not greatly overlap.